The Interactive Geometry Software Cinderella

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timm
2 stars
Cinderella 2 Animations


I just upgraded this afternoon from Cinderella 1.4 to 2.0. I'm disappointed that animations that used to run smoothly under 1.4 now flicker and jerk - the performance is very noticeably worse under the new software. Both the construction itself and the controls for the animation show very annoying flickering redraws. Maybe this is related to problems you have mentioned before involving Java and circles?

This is on a G4 Mac running MacOS 10.4.6, and with Java 1.5.0_06 installed, and using Cindy 2.0 build 701 for PPC Macs.

Is there a way to deal with this, maybe using a different JVM?

Despite this dfficulty, I remain a huge fan of Cinderella.
 
on: Thu 08 of Jun, 2006 [00:56 UTC] reads: 114160

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Aw: Cinderella 2 Animations
on: Thu 08 of Jun, 2006 [07:27 UTC]
Hi,

can you please check whether Antialiasing is turned on? I suspect we are using a wrong default setting on PPC Macs; unfortunately, I don't have one right here to check it myself.

Thanks,

Ulli

PS: the VM used by Cinderella on Mac OS X (PPC) should be 1.3.1, as this uses hardware acceleration. On Intel-based Macs, we use Java 1.5.

author message
timm
2 stars
Re: Aw: Cinderella 2 Animations
on: Thu 08 of Jun, 2006 [15:26 UTC]
Ulli,

Oh, thanks for motivating me to find the Edit->Information panel. I was looking for something like Options or Preferences, and had missed Information. I wonder if changing the name to Options might help others get oriented?

In any case, turning Antialiasing on and off doesn't change anything in my animation, although my animation doesn't have any labels.

What does make a difference is double buffering. If I turn double buffering off, then the animation works fine. If I leave double buffering on (the way the software ships) then the animation is jerky and flickering. So turning double buffering off completely solves the problem. Maybe the software should ship with it turned off by default?

When double buffering is turned on, one of the things that happens in the animation is that the animation control tools keep getting written over by the grey background, so that they flicker horribly. I think the same thing is happening with the geometry elements, and that this is what causes the flickering, erratic animation. Turning off double buffering stops this from happening.

Now, this description of what happens seems exactly backwards from the way I would expect it to work. Shouldn't double buffering make the animations smoother? Could it be that double buffering is actually on when the Information panel says it is off, and off when the panel says it is on?

Tim Mclarnan

author message
Aw: Re: Aw: Cinderella 2 Animations
on: Thu 08 of Jun, 2006 [16:00 UTC]
> I wonder if changing the name to Options might help others get oriented?

I don't know; but we will probably not change it.

> What does make a difference is double buffering.

Oh, yes, that's what I meant, actually.

> Maybe the software should ship with it turned off by default?

Yes, but only on Mac OS X (PPC) — see below.

> Now, this description of what happens seems exactly backwards from the way I would expect it to work. Shouldn't double buffering make the animations smoother? Could it be that double buffering is actually on when the Information panel says it is off, and off when the panel says it is on?

No, the problem is that we are using a rather tricky approach on Mac OS X with Java 1.3.1 where we are painting with a non-standard method (i.e.: it's a hack). As Mac OS X does double-buffering automatically, turning on double-buffering in Java will create triple-buffering, and slow everything down.

I will have a look into the default setting and we will fix this in the next update. Thanks a lot for your feedback!

Ulli



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